Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! (35 page)

He leaned over, peering close at my phone, lifting his glasses and putting the screen to within just centimeters of his left eye. “This is not the Berlin City History Layer?” he asked.

I had no idea what he was talking about. “This is ThriftyCityBerlin. com,” I said for the third time since I'd walked through the door ten minutes earlier. “Part of the worldwide ThriftyCity tourist app network. We're the world's fastest growing location-based couponing system, with thirty-seven cities worldwide and more added every month.” I spun out the spiel slowly, concentrating on my German pronunciation, not trusting that he understood everything through my American accent.

He pursed his lips and wrinkled his nose, staring at me. Then he frowned and shook his head and I knew I'd lost. Damn. I was already seventeen minutes and two sales behind schedule and it wasn't even noon. “No, no, this isn't the one I want my store in. I need to be listed with Berlin City History. If I find that letter, I can e-mail a picture of it to you. That will be proof enough of our historical importance, yes?”

It took me seven more precious minutes to explain to him that I couldn't help him, that I had nothing to do with Berlin City History, whatever that was, and to leave him my card. I stepped back out the front door and into the warm summer light of Frankfurter Tor. The late morning traffic in the roundabout provided a dull roar as background music to my frustrated mood. I pulled up the Sales Tracking app on my phone and checked out of the antique store, punching the “No Sale” button with an angry tap.

My next sales call was three hundred meters away, down Karl Marx Allee, on the left. I shuffled forward, bringing up the phone's Marketplace app and speaking slowly into the microphone, “Berlin City History Layer,” taking care to pronounce the German as precisely as possible. Like the antique store owner, I used the English word “layer” The app came up first on the list, its icon a stereotypical image of the Brandenburg Gate superimposed over a German flag. It cost 3 euros, but it was a company phone and I figured I could justify the expense (as I would definitely have to do) as opposition research. It was a big one, over a gig, and I slipped the phone into my shirt's breast pocket while it downloaded.

Karl Marx Allee was maybe the widest street I'd ever been on, certainly the widest in Berlin. Lined on both sides with massive, vaguely art-deco style buildings, it had been built as the showcase for East Germany's greatness, a boulevard to rival the Champs Elysees. Having been to Paris, this didn't come close, but it had a certain grandeur to it. Did it look this way when my dad had been in Berlin? Dad had left when he was only three years old, so he'd never shared any real memories of life in Berlin sixty years ago. And oma had died before I was born, just a few years after mom and dad moved from Heidelberg to St. Louis, but I bet she'd walked this street at some point in her life, back when these hulking examples of model modernity had been the pride of East Germany.

I was within ten meters of my destination, an ice cream shop which, judging from all the shiny new plastic, definitely hadn't been here in oma's day when my phone started vibrating against my nipple, a quick double-pulse that signified a text message. Only one person that could be. I pulled out the phone to look at my the message from my boss.

Ned: No sale again.

His text was in English, which made sense since he was in Philadelphia and, apparently, up very early. Ned was a very hands-on manager, surprisingly so given half his work force was on the other side of the Atlantic, spread out across a dozen different countries.

“Nope, wants to be on a competing service,” I dictated back to him.

Ned: Wants to be? Already is??

“Wants to be. Berlin City History Layer. I'm downloading it now.”

Ned: Googling it now.

Ned: Okay, this is history guide stuff. Not sales. Not coupons.

Ned: How did you not close this?

I took a breath. I didn't need this hectoring right now. “I'll hit him back tomorrow.”

Ned: You have a full day tomorrow.

Ned: Check your schedule.

I knew I had a full day tomorrow, and I knew Ned knew I knew. He'd only tell me to check it if something had changed. I pulled up the Sales Control app and, lo and behold, my schedule had gotten even fuller. There were five new sales calls added to the twenty I already knew about. “Fuck you, Ned,” I said to Karl Marx Allee, but not to my phone.

To the phone I said the only thing I could say, “Okay, got it.” Ned didn't reply. He'd made his point. His many points. The same points as always—he was watching, I was behind. Sell, sell, sell.

The history app had finished loading, so I launched it, which brought up a dense block of German text constituting the software's End User License Agreement. My spoken German, honed by summers spent with mom and her family in the South, was decent, but reading was still a chore. I always took care to make sure my Sales Targets here didn't see me sounding out the bigger words, something I didn't need Ned to tell me was unprofessional and a sales-killer. I touched accept, got another block of Germanic legalese and hit accept again. One more time and I was done, or so I thought. Then the damn thing started importing “Personalized User Experience Data,” and I couldn't stand around waiting for it.

I let it do its thing in the background while I brought up Thrifty City Berlin, and the sample layer I'd put together for Marx Eis, the Communist-kitsch ice cream parlor with flavors named after Lenin, Trotsky, Marx, and Engels. I didn't know a thing about Engels, except that his flavor was mint chocolate, but I'd mocked up a two-for-one coupon in his name. I went in, all smiles and “guten morgens” and came out thirty-one minutes later with a successful close. The young Danish couple who owned the place loved the idea.

My phone emitted a two-tone ping I'd never heard before. Not a congratulatory text from Ned of course, that didn't happen. It was the Berlin City History app telling me it was finally ready for action. I held it up and watched the screen as it transformed the sunshine-drenched modern Karl Marx Allee into a black-and-white, sixty-year-old Stalin Allee, complete with a parade of Soviet Tanks down the middle of the street. It was the best Augmented Reality layer I'd ever seen. I slowly turned in place, scanning all up and down the broad boulevard. They'd modeled every building, and I was surprised to see how much was the same. Trees and signs and kiosks were different of course, but the imposing architecture remained, looking more imposing in black and white.

When I stopped moving the phone for more than a couple seconds, icons started to pop up, info tags attached to different buildings and even points in the middle of the street. One icon had a pulsing red border around it, centered on the apartment building across the street from me. I touched it and it expanded to fill the screen. There was a photo of one Folker Horst, a stern, chubby man in his fifties with a thick mustache who looked a little like Stalin. The text explained that he'd been an anti-Nazi resistor in the 1930's who'd fled to Russia and then returned to Berlin after the war before being arrested and disappeared by the Stasi in 1962. I touched the “More Information” button, and the text expanded to include a multi-branching family tree.

The names were too small to make out on the small screen, but I could see two names on opposite ends were pulsing red. I pinched to zoom in. The top name was this guy, Folker Horst, 1901 to 1962. The other name was a complete shock: Martin Manning, born 1989. Me. The murdered Folker Horst, who I'd never heard of in my life, was my distant cousin, on my dad's side of the family, and the Berlin City History app knew it. Holy shit.

I doubted for a moment that the connection was real, but the family tree had everything right that I could verify—mom and dad's families, oma, the older brother my dad never really knew, Uncle Leon. I tapped his name on the tree and saw his dates: 1938 to 1953. Twelve years older than my dad, he'd survived the whole war and then died when he was fifteen. Another fact about my life my phone knew before me.

A double-pulse alert vibrated the phone in my hand, which was already shaking a little on its own. I switched to the messenger app.

Ned: You ok?

I closed my eyes, counted to two, and dictated my response. “I'm moving, no worries.” Ned didn't reply. He could monitor my movements in real time. I'd seen the set-up—six linked twenty-eight-inch screens with Google maps of thirty different cities, all keyed into the GPS units in our phones. His asking if I was okay was just Ned's way of yelling, “Get back to fucking work.” I assumed he'd clicked the “Slack Meter” box on my work profile. Three clicks in one day, and I'd get a warning. Three warnings accumulated in one quarter and I'd get a Slack Badge, which meant losing one of my five vacation days and lowering the threshold for future warnings from three to two. And yep, there it came, the auto-generated ping indicating I'd gotten the Slack click. I picked up the pace and headed for my next stop.

Fueled by fear of being labeled a Gen-Y slacker once again, I hit my next target, a convenience store and Internet café owned by a wary, forty-something Turk. He listened politely and was having none of it, not even the free trial. I thought I saw a crack of light when I showed him the coupon features, but no dice. I bought a Berliner pilsner and some kibbeh before checking out “No Sale,” wolfing the meat pie down as I fast-walked to the U-Bahn station and caught a train downtown.

With twelve minutes to think to myself, I played with the Berlin City app some more, poking around the settings which, by default, were set to wide open. The thing pulled in data from my Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and LinkedIn. According to the “About” page, it also interfaced with the fully digitized archives of seventeen different Berlin museums and universities, drawing on an pool of 270,000 pictures. It was a massive undertaking, but I wasn't surprised I'd never heard of it—not a coupon or a sales tool to be found in the whole thing, and it didn't accept advertising. On the plus side, the whole thing was Open Source, so maybe we could get some value out of it for ThriftyCity. I tried to come up with some sales-oriented opportunity before I reached my stop, hoping to undo the damage from my demerit, but nothing came to me.

Mitte's crowded, narrower streets were a sharp contrast to the football-field wide Karl Marx Allee. This was the center of Berlin, with a rich mixture of businessmen, shoppers, and tourists clogging up the sidewalks. The architecture was more classic Berlin as well—facades echoing the nineteenth century instead of Communist dream-palaces, with some more modern glass-and-steel structures scattered here and there. My assignments for the rest of the day were all up and down Wilhelmstrasse, one of the main North-South drags in downtown. My first stop was a four-star restaurant. Well, I gave it four stars in the demo I'd made for them—figuring anyone ballsy enough to charge twenty-three euros for a schmaltz and black bread appetizer must be good or they'd be out of business.

As I stood before the door, checking into the target on my phone, I got an alert from Berlin City, a bright yellow pop-up window that said, “Leon Manning, Your Uncle, Was 210 Meters From Your Current Location.” I blinked and didn't do the right thing. Instead I touched the “Map” button, causing a map of the Berlin streets around me to take over the screen, a bright yellow dot with my uncle's name just two blocks away. It was the opposite direction from my next sales calls, but the shiver of needful curiosity coursing through me would not be denied. No one talked about Uncle Leon. No one had even called him Uncle Leon before that moment. He'd died almost sixty-five years ago, but he'd lived right around the corner from me.

I figured I never closed the high-end restaurants anyway, so Ned wouldn't know the difference. With a few swipes, I turned off the GPS on my phone. It was spotty, especially indoors, so he'd assume I'd lost the connection while inside, which gave me a good twenty minutes to go see my uncle. The place was close enough that I might even be within the error bars of cell tower triangulation. I screwed up my courage, squared my shoulders, and fast-walked up the street. It didn't take even three minutes for me to come up to the imposing, clean-lined facade of a building identified on my phone as the Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. It was neat and orderly, like much of downtown, and there were tourists milling about in the small open plaza, reading plaques and taking pictures.

My uncle's yellow dot was on the other side of the plaza, and as I closed in the phone buzzed again. Panic that it was Ned checking up on me drew fear sweat from the small of my back, but it was actually a different kind of crisis. The Berlin City app was telling me that I'd entered a Crisis Point, and was wondering if I'd like to “Explore More?” I did indeed, and touched the screen to bring up the interactive augmented reality layer. My phone offered me two options, “1941 - Luftwaffe HQ” and “1953 - Worker's Revolt.” The fact that this modern-day ministry had been the nerve center for the London Blitz was intriguing, but the 1953 date was pulsing and glowing red. Even without this unsubtle hint, I'd have chosen the year my uncle died.

Through my phone's screen, the small plaza filled with black and white workers, East Germans massed outside what was then called the House of Ministries, angry about something. I swung my phone around the plaza, and there were photos of people in every direction. It was a strange effect, like standing in a sea of cardboard cutouts, but ones which magically turned to face you no matter which angle you looked at them from.

I'd never heard of mass protests in East Berlin, at least not before the Wall came down in 1989. I touched the “More” icon, and my phone froze for just a second. Then it started streaming a deep, serious-toned German male voice “Angered by inhumane demands for increased productivity from Ulbricht and other DDR leaders, workers throughout East Berlin went on mass strike, gathering here on June 17 with cries of 'Free Elections! Down with Government!' This first and largest protest of the Cold War era in Berlin would not be matched until 1989.”